This year has been one of incredible innovation and growth for Yahoo. For those who did not use the web much until recently, you may not have realized that Yahoo did much more than search or email. For those who are old hands at the web since the 1990s, you may not realize how much they have done since 2000, when they really started adding on new services and features at a prodigious rate. But very few people probably realize how many web services Yahoo now owns. They haven't been really loud about it - but they have been active at it. Unless you happened to be using the site, or found a link to it from another Yahoo service that itself was not well known, you probably never heard that site got bought up by Yahoo. They own so many sites I do not even know of a page that lists them all. I am not even sure if Yahoo has such a page out on the web yet. But, it is a lot - let me tell you! You can do a lot of things at Yahoo. Any kind of entertainment, shopping, travel, communications, notifications, news, social web, and tagging activities you want to do - Yahoo has a site for it now. There has been a lot of talk about Web 2.0 this year. Yahoo has those things. They own Flickr and del.icio.us, two of the best known social web, Web 2.0, tagging sites out there. If you do lots of photography and bookmarking, chances are you already know about these two sites. There has been a lot of talk about blogging for the last two years. Yahoo has 360, a pretty decent blogging site. It has nice features in it too. For instance, you get to maintain your own blogroll, which is a list of sites you visit regularly. It is a handy place to put a link to this site. Better yet, your profile page on this site. That way, your friends can find your home page here, even if they have lost the bookmark for it or they are at a friend's house and do not have access to any of their bookmarks. Since Apple introduced podcasting support for iTunes in the middle of this year, interest in listening to podcasts has exploded. Yahoo has a podcasts site which catalogs, reviews, rates - and allows searching for, listening to, and subscribing to - podcasts. It works extremely well, is very easy to use, and looks great. It is very worthwhile if you are into listening to podcasts. For instance, you could be listening to one now while you are reading this or typing in your latest reviews. Kind of multitasking intensive, but possible. Or, if you are eating and you can't type at the moment, might be a good time to fire up a podcast to listen to while you go at that. Yahoo's searching capabilities are growing by leaps and bounds. Even before they bought del.icio.us a week or two ago, they already had a social tagging/bookmarking feature for web sites feature that has been out in public beta for half a year or more. These are great things because they will let you find your most frequently used or more seriously needed bookmarks when you are away from home or the office. You can keep them Private, in case they are stuff you do not want to show around or are of no interest to anyone. You can share them with friends in your Community. Or, you can make them Public. It is up to you, with the Yahoo one. The del.icio.us one is strictly public. Yahoo is doing tons of stuff with RSS. They have been doing RSS almost since it was invented. RSS has turned out to be the plumbing that connects live feeds of information on one site, to other sites, and now most web browsers and even some custom desktop software. Many of Yahoo's sites produce live feeds of the latest views of their information. The latest news, the blog entries, the latest happenings and upcoming events in your town, the latest you-name-it. So far, for whatever reason, this gigantic trove of resources on the web that Yahoo lets people use for free has not been hyped yet. Remember back in the 1990s when at the end of every TV commercial for food you heard, "...a Beatrice product". Well, it's like that now, except with the newest hotest things on the web. They don't have anything that competes with TV.com and frankly I haven't seen anything that does as much in-depth treatment as this site does on TV for any topic. So I don't worry that anything on Yahoo would lure anyone away from this site. But I do think they have useful, entertaining, and informative stuff. Next time you are thinking of looking up directions or doing a web search, mosey on over to Yahoo and nose around a little. You will be surprised at all you find with a little exploring while you are there.